Pulsebar

A menu bar system monitor for macOS with a glass HUD dashboard: live CPU, GPU, RAM, and Disk gauges, top processes, and native alerts. Universal binary (Apple Silicon + Intel). Built with Tauri 2 and SvelteKit.

Install

brew tap inajaf/tap
brew install --cask pulsebar

Or grab the .dmg from Releases and drag Pulsebar into Applications. The app isn't notarized yet, so on first launch either right-click → Open, or run xattr -cr /Applications/Pulsebar.app. (Homebrew handles this for you.)

Features

• Lives in the menu bar — click the tray icon to toggle the dashboard; no dock icon.
• Arc gauges with severity colors — cyan → amber at 85% → red at 99%, plus temperature and used/total bytes where available.
• Sparklines — a one-minute live trend under every gauge.
• Top 3 lists — heaviest processes by CPU and by memory, largest installed apps by disk size.
• Smart alerts — a native notification only when a metric stays critical (debounced, re-arms with hysteresis).
• Light footprint — ~0.2% of one core and ~86 MB RAM while in the background (polling slows from 1s to 3s when hidden).

Sensor support

Metric	macOS	Windows
CPU / RAM / Disk	✅	✅
GPU usage	✅	✅ NVIDIA only
CPU / GPU temp	— no public API	✅ NVIDIA / ACPI

Development

npm install
npm run tauri dev    # full app
npm run dev          # UI only in a browser, with demo data
npm run check        # type-check

Releases are automated: pushing a v* tag builds a universal binary and publishes it via GitHub Actions (.github/workflows/release.yml).

Layout

• src/ — SvelteKit dashboard (gauges, cards, sparklines, metrics store)
• src-tauri/src/sensors/ — per-metric sampling
• src-tauri/src/lib.rs — app setup, polling loop; tray.rs, notify.rs, state.rs — tray, alerts, shared state